This is the first day of my first blogpost. A friend of mine, with oppposite political leanings, was blogging before blogging was popular. He has encouraged me over to years to get a blog, mainly for my business. After much hesitation, I decided to go for it (but leaving my business out of it for now). The reasons are twofold: 1) I have some ideas and opinions I'd like to share with others, and would like to hear what other people from around the world have to say; and 2) I heard it was a way to make extra money. My friend makes money from ads, and from hits on his blog. So, I thought......what the heck.
Any ideas out there on how to make this a money maker???
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congrats on your first post!
ReplyDeleteWay to go! I admire anyone who really gets involved. Good job
ReplyDeleteWell you are late to the game and I have never monetized a blog. but I did monetize a forum and did pretty well and even sold it for a tidy sum.
ReplyDeleteObviously you need eyeballs on your site. and once here, there has to be either ads that are viewed and clicked on or content/membership that folks are willing to pay for. Paid content/memberships are a tough row to hoe, but getting ads on the page is easy. Getting enough traffic so that the ads generate any significant revenue: not so much.
If you really want to monetize the site then I suggest that you treat that idea as a venture for which you will require an education and plan on a reasonable amount of time on that education. Google is the place to start. Both in terms of it as a search engine and also as an educational resource. See Google wants lots of successful websites out there running ads from their adsense program and advertising on Google. They have some fantastic tools, not the least of which is Google Analytics (GA) All you need to do is have a Google account and GA is free. GA can provide you with oodles of statistics about the traffic on your site,both graphic and text. How many visitors, what they do when here, where they came from, where they went after they leave, keywords used to find you,-- even the browser they use. Addtionally, google has many pages of educational information on monetizing and webmastering and also forums for the same thing. You can learn a lot there.
There are also other statistic sites like Quantcast and I used more than one on my site in that they offered slightly different slants on the same data. You need to insert pieces of code on each page of your site and both the wordpress pfrums and Google forums can help iwth that if you have a hard time with that.
I was and am no expert on the keys and code side of things and I eventually figured it out.
There is also a ton written about blogging and promoting blogs and generating traffic- forums, resources on sites that also offer paid service to do that. Just got to search and refine search terms and read read read.
One of the most powerful drivers of traffic are search engines and the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO)is one you will want to use as a search term and learn as much as you can about it. It has unbelievable levels of complexity but to begin with, keywords and links back to your site are the things to focus on. Keywords are the words that people type into a search engine and are also present on your site at a level that your site comes up as high as possible on the search results. There is a whole world of strategies with keywords, from which ones you focus on to how they are used on your pages. They can and should be both in your unseen meta tags and also in your content. Links back to your site from other sites is one of the ways that a search engine calculates the relevance of your site for a keyword. (oh and there are also Keyphrases)So lets say a keyword you want to use is "progressive". Someone types progressive in google, and tons of sites with that keyword meta tag and in the site content also have links back to you. Its over simplified, but that improves how close to the top you wind up on that person's search. (oh and there are also sites where you can look at the perfomance of key words and how many sites use them and which ones are underused-- this gives you niche traffic opportunies.)
That should get you started. Be patient, be persistant and invest the time if you really want to monetize.
Thanks for your help. I'll get back to you later.....taking a day off while my husband and I have a couple of little kidlets spend the night (my 5yr old great-nephew and 3yr old great-niece)
ReplyDeleteStew, I just had a chance to read all of the info you suggested. Thanks, and WOW...it's going to a lot more work than I thought.
ReplyDeleteI'll start my research. In the meantime, I hope you continue to read my blog. Pass it on to anyone else who might be interested. BYW...do you have a blog?